India’s Biocon Ltd on Thursday launched a cancer drug, Abraxane, here in partnership with Abu Dhabi-based company Neopharma.
Abraxane can be used for the treatment of breast cancer after failure of combination therapy for metastatic disease or relapse within six months of chemotherapy.
“The drug is going to change the way breast cancer is treated through chemotherapy as it is a combination of chemotherapy and a biotech formulation,” Chairman and Managing Director of Biocon Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw said today.
“As it uses nanotechnology and a protein, it allows you to deliver a very cyto-toxic agent in a very targeted way to the tumour and will hence make a huge difference to cancer patients,” Shaw said.
She said the transformation of her company’s focus from an industrial enzymes manufacturer to biopharmaceuticals happened due to an understanding of proteins.
“When we started seeing what else we could do using the technologies that we had developed for enzymes, biopharmaceuticals became a natural extension,” she added.
The whole business of biopharmaceuticals was very different from industrial enzymes,” Shaw added.
On her own journey from being a master brewer to a successful businesswoman, she said “I ventured into biotechnology because of my passion for the biological sciences when nothing was happening in this field.
It has taken me 30 years to really build a company that is now world r enowned. So it has been a very satisfying journey and of course I still have got a long way to go.”